by Maurice Harris and Robert Rosenthal
2013
Community Reparations to Transform Community Desolation
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Why do so many well-meaning people struggle so much with how to support poor community members and their houseless neighbors? How do the conceptions of collective responsibility from the Talmud that Aryeh Cohen sites become distorted or lost? What seems to be missing from many of these narratives is a direct look at systems like capitalism, colonialism, and their requisite bedmate: what I call the “cult of independence.”
2013
Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S. Policy
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Photography by Paul Dix, Edited by Pamela Fitzpatrick
2013
Healing the Miser Within: The Kabbalah of Giving and Receiving
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The Hebrew term for gratitude, hakarat hatov, literally means recognition of the good. Recognizing the good one has received from others is indeed the force that inspires gratitude and the desire to give back.
2013
Beyond the Limits of Love: Building the Religious Counterculture
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The signature orientation of liberal religion has rather been one toward increasing personal freedom from religious strictures. The joke is that the Ten Commandments have been demoted to “ten suggestions.”
2013
We Are One Body: A Christian Perspective on Justice in the City
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Understanding our common connections doesn’t in itself solve the problem. When we are feeling the pinch of scarcity, human beings become territorial.
2013
Islamic Law and the Boundaries of Social Responsibility
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The face of the Other should strike doubt and obligation into any person of conscience, forcing us to continue asking, “Am I doing enough?” This, of course, threatens an infinite obligation: other people’s traumas, precarity-inducing misfortunes, addictions, and struggles will never cease, especially in the city.
2013
The Magic of Organizing?
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In Harry Potter, the wizarding world and the world of Muggles—the ordinary, boring, unmagical people—are at first kept separate, barely impacting one another. In Moriarty’s book, there aren’t two worlds, only one. Magic isn’t a counterculture. It is everyone’s folk culture.
2013
Justice in the City
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The obligation to accompany another is an obligation to cross boundaries. In accompanying the dead, the boundaries that are crossed are those between life and death.
2013
New Poems in an Ancient Language
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The Israeli poet Admiel Kosman shifts his voice adroitly between ancient and modern, while never seeming quite settled in either. There is a persistent restlessness; nothing is ever straightforward or taken for granted. The poems wrestle with God, spiritual practice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the place of a poet’s work in society, the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and the baggage of tradition borne by the Hebrew language itself.
2013
A Poet’s Meditation on Force
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Army Cats
by Tom Sleigh
Graywolf Press, 2011
In Army Cats, American poet Tom Sleigh takes on the topic of the 2007 Lebanese Civil War not as an excuse for wanton journalistic rubbernecking, but as a catalyst for a series of troubled meditations on the nature of “force” within contemporary culture. Let me explain what I mean by force. To do so requires a look back at the groundbreaking work of philosopher and activist Simone Weil. Writing in the first year of World War II, in an effort to show that Hitler’s rise to power was not the anomaly that other intellectuals claimed it to be, Weil composed one of the most famous meditations on violence ever written, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force.”
Early in the essay, Weil defines what she means by “force”:
To define force—it is that x which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to its limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.
2013
Readers Respond: Letters from Winter 2013
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Letters on restorative justice, pinkwashing, statism, and immigration from the Winter 2013 issue.